How to: Broadcom Wireless cards without Ndiswrapper for Dapper and Edgy

****In my edgy knot 2 testing I found that edgy users can stop the guide after competing stage 4 or 4b as it 'just works' with out network-manager if you fill in the SSID and set the wireless device to DHCP in the "networking" option under System > Administration****

This Should work with Apple hardware as well as PC's.

How to get a wireless card working in Ubuntu 6.06 or 6.10) with a Broadcom chipset 43xx

This guide assumes 2 things:

Wired Internet access on the machine with the wireless card on it, in my case i had a 10/100 LAN card that i was using as i couldn't get wireless to work which gave me full access to internet - although it is possible to put the files required on a CD and then add that CD as a repo in synaptic on the wireless machine, how to do this is not covered here, you could even extract the firmware on a different PC and place it in the right location on a remote PC using a CD/Pen drive taking a .deb of network manager with you.

A CLEAN install of dapper or edgy, most of the problems/failures in the responses to this guide have been because of unclean installs giving configuration that gets in the way of this guide and stops it from working, my dapper was installed during the Flight 5 stage and updated from there to knot 2 so its not necessary to reinstall from 6.0* or even if it has been updated from breezy but you might want to think about reinstalling if you've messed around with Ndis prior to this.

Okay so you have a wireless card that shows up in ubuntu but doesnt connect to any wireless network?

The reason the card shows up but doesn't work is because ubuntu is only distributed with its driver (so it can recognize it) not with its firmware (so it can USE it) for legal reasons.

However you can take the firmware out of the windows drivers and put them into ubuntu and make the card work!

Follow these steps to get your wireless card working under ubuntu dapper 6.06:

To find out if your card has a broadcom chipset run the following command:

Code:

lspci | grep Broadcom\ Corporation

If that returns a string of numbers followed by the words Broadcom Corporation and then some more numbers then your in luck!
But if not, try my guide anyway, it cant do any harm and it might work for you, its largely untested for cards other than mine and the success stories posted here so give it a go and see!

It seems that if you get the following string back: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02) that this guide is VERY unlikly to work for you although it does sometimes, dont ask me why, but basically every "no" vote and "this didnt work for me" post comes from a BCM4318 user....

Prerequisite

Ubuntu dapper

A wireless card that shows up in Ubuntu

A driver installation CD (for Windows) OR a driver for your card from the internet

you may have to repeat this step each time the kernel is updated or you may not, your results may vary.

Note The location and name of the .o file for this command may differ in your case, if you really get stuck type bcm43xx-fwcutter and then hit space, find your file using the GUI and then drag and drop it into the terminal.

5 ) Install Network Manager
I find that this is the best way to manage wireless connections

Code:

sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome

It may ask for your password and may ask you to press y to install, but dont worry its really easy

You may find that Network Manager adds itself to system > preferences > sessions >startup programs
or you may not, if you find its not inlcuded, add

6 ) Bookmark this page and Reboot
Press Ctrl + D and then click on add

Then log out & reboot
Return to this page after logging back in again

7 ) Use your new Wireless connection
From what i remember network manager should now show up by your clock and display your current connection, if your lucky it will show a series of bars, this means your now using your wireless connection so lucky you!

If it doesnt, right click on it and tick "Enable Wireless" then left click on it
and select the wirless network of your choice.

Thanks, i hope this helps...

Issues:
----------------------------------------------------
Ensure the router you are connecting to supports 802.11 B connections
as this is what the card is now set up to use, check if your router has a "mixed"
setting rather than a G only setting which it should as G is backwards compatible with B
----------------------------------------------------
For anyone that is having problems, try this:

Code:

modprobe bcm43xx

and reboot
----------------------------------------------------
Information about networkmanager

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NetworkManager
----------------------------------------------------
people seem to be having trouble getting this specific card: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02) working using this guide, take a look at this post for help:http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...4&postcount=43
orhttp://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=218 if your looking to Ndis instead
----------------------------------------------------
If you find your driver comes in a windows EXE format, typically this will just extract the drivers and can be run using Wine and then collected from your wine directory in the same places you can find them in windows
you could try renaming them to filename.zip and seeing if they open that way too.

Re: How to: Broadcom Wireless cards

A little adjustment...

The command "bcm43xx-fwcutter /home/$USER/Desktop/bcmwl5.sys" creates the firmware files in the directory you are current in...it cannot be assumed that is the "Desktop".

I couldn't figure out why it wasn't creating the files, then I stumbled across them in my "~" directory (where I ran the command). Not a huge thing, but I wouldn't consider myself too much of a linux newbie and it got me.

Other than that...great work...I have wireless without the pain of the ndiswrapper manual install!!! Thanks a ton!

Re: How to: Broadcom Wireless cards

Thank you!

Wow, thank you soo much. This was an excellent guide. I cannot express my gratitude enough for taking the time to make such a wonderful guide.

I spent most of my day yesterday trying to setup my wireless on my laptop following the guides on the wiki. After messing around for quite some time, I finally got it to work. However, it wasn't even working all that great (I had to constantly config the wireless each time I rebooted via terminal).

Then unfortunetly I had to reinstall my unbuntu (Dapper Drake btw) becuase of some problems I had trying to install KDE. Any how, I told myself I would reread over the wiki again today.

To my unfortunate surprise, when I went to go look in the wiki today (search broadcom) all the guides that were there yesterday now redirect to a new guide that is terrible. I almost lost it. It was there one day, and gone the next (literally).

I didn't know what to do. So I tryed my luck to search on the forums, and up came this thread, my life saver.

Not only was this explanation much faster than anything else I've read, but it actually works completely for me. I love the new network manager that I didn't even know existed. Thank you for telling us about it, works much better than the default. I can just click and switch wireless connections easily.

In my opinion, not only should this thread be made a sticky, but someone should add it to the unbuntu wiki. This will help many people and spread the word out on how to once and for all get these cards to work.

Thanks again, really appreciate it.

Also I noticed this thread is under the Breezy section. I'm actually using the latest version of Dapper Drake (6.06 I believe) and I notice most users are having broadcom problems with Dapper. If it could be moved somewhere to a more general place, that would be very helpful for future users I'm sure.

Update

Also I didn't have my driver CD at hand during this whole process. Luckily I was able to copy the driver (bcmwl5.sys) from my windows disk (under /Windows/System32/Drivers/bcmwl5.sys) and extract it that way to my unbuntu firmware directory. For future members reading this helpful I guide, I would like to add that you can grab the latest version of this driver from here -> bcmwl5.sys (if you could add that into the guide somehow it would be great)

Re: How to: Broadcom Wireless cards

Thanks Vaan, i didnt even realise there was a dapper and breezy section, i have PMed a mod to rectify this, Thankyou!

I will also incorporate your update into the instructions an another method of obtaining the driver files.

I am testing my own modification to the guide at the moment which enables an entire step to be removed, it seems in Cutter you can specify where the files are created to, so if i specify that they are created to /lib/firmware you wont have to move them by hand! i'll give it a go and get back to you all tonight. - **implemented**